The Fate Of Hungarian Art Collections

Studies of the history of Hungarian art collections displaced during the Second
World War have reached contradictory conclusions. Ekaterina Genieva examines
the evidence for two differing versions of how items came into the hands of the
Nizhny Novgorod museum.

This catalogue is the second to be compiled under the ‘Heritage Revealed’ project. The purpose of the project is to publish information on art objects
and other valuable cultural property lost as a result of the Holocaust and
currently being kept in Russia.

This publication covers a group of paintings and sculptures from pre-war Jewish
collections in Hungary that are now stored at the Nizhny Novgorod (formerly
Gorky) State Art Museum. The
‘Hungarian Collection’ of the Museum includes 151 works of painting and sculpture, four incunabula,
and a selection of 21 sheets in a portfolio. But the present Catalogue contains
only 52 items, believed to have been seized by the Nazis from Hungarian
Holocaust victims. Descriptions of the rest of the paintings as well as of the
books from Baron Kornfeld
’s collection lie outside the scope of this publication.

Studies of the history of Hungarian art collections displaced during the Second
World War have reached contradictory conclusions. The confiscation of treasures
by the Third Reich has been fairly well studied and documented, although when
it comes to documentation concerning the transfer of Hungarian valuables to the
USSR and the United States after the end of the Second World war, things look
less clear. At the same time, there are Hungarian art objects listed by some
people as lost that were discovered long ago. Certain discrepancies become
obvious when one compares these two versions of events.

Hungarian cultural losses, like those of other Central European countries, were
enormous. Paintings, sculptures and other works of art were plundered from the
National Fine Arts Museum and from private collections, including some as
remarkable as those of the Herzog family, Ferenc Hatvany and Moric Kornfeld. A
considerable part of the looted treasures transferred to Germany during those
years was returned to Hungary, including almost all items belonging to museums.
The return by the United States in 1978 of Hungary
’s greatest relic, the Crown of Saint Stephen, in a way symbolized the end of
this process. But for a long time the fate of the greater part of the private
collections remained obscure.

Under the ‘people’s democracy’ regime in Hungary, officials used to put all the blame for the confiscations on
the Nazis, primarily on the special troops under the command of Adolf Eichmann,
actively supported by the Szalasi government after the coup d’état and occupation in 1944. A number of studies are dedicated to this
plundering. Yet, even in those times many people supposed that after Budapest
was taken by the Soviet troops, cultural valuables kept in the bank
depositories in the capital might have been seized along with other bank
assets. The most radical version of these events has been put forward by Laszlo
Mravik, a Hungarian researcher who called his 1998 catalogue of lost Hungarian
valuables
‘
Sacco di Budapest’ – a reference to the famous Sacco di Roma of 1527 when the forces of Emperor
Charles V plundered Rome. In his extensive preface Mravik openly declared
‘the Soviet Union and its successor’ (that is, Russia) to be responsible for the losses sustained in Hungary. The
catalogue also contains a number of documents attesting to the transfer of
treasures from Budapest to the USSR.

But Mravik’s catalogue does not trace the fate of those 151 paintings and sculptures from
Hungary that were moved to the USSR, even though their history has been
established. Of course, 151 works of art out of 80,000 officially listed lost
items are just a drop in the ocean. Yet their fate is significant and, perhaps,
shows that sometimes things are not quite as simple as Mravik would have us
believe. Documents extant in the archives of the Nizhny Novgorod State Art
Museum and the Grabar All-Russia Art Restoration Centre provide a basis for
objective study.

There are various oral and sworn written statements as to the wanderings of the
Hungarian paintings (let us call them
‘paintings‘ for short, bearing in mind that there are also eight sculptures) in the years
immediately after the war. The first relevant official document referring to
the collection is dated 3 December 1951. This is the Act of inspection that
took place under the supervision of N. Slonevsky, Director of the Pushkin State
Museum of Fine Arts. The Act states:
‘In February 1946 … the Museum took the collection of paintings, sculptures and books for temporary
safekeeping from a certain army unit. There are no proper documents concerning
the transfer of the collection to the museum. Nor were any acts drawn up
testifying to the receipt of exhibits
‘. Eyewitnesses to these events confirmed that it was the 49th Army that arrived
in Gorky from Germany with the treasures in the autumn of 1945. Like all the
‘trophy’ treasures in the USSR, these works of art brought by the 49th Army were segregated into special collections.

The delay in registering the collection was explained in the following way: ‘As far as museum officials remember, the military men refused to sign any
documents whatsoever
’. On 7 December the condition report was compiled; on 20 December another
document was signed confirming transfer of the collection to the custody of the
museum
’s chief curator for safekeeping. It contains the full list of 162 works of art,
identified very cursorily; one of the most famous Manets,
<
span class="tIlalic">Mary Laurent with a Pug-dog, was listed simply as ‘portrait of a woman‘.

Meanwhile the Pushkin Museum did not limit itself to helping to classify the
collection; it also obtained a Ministry of Culture order concerning its
transfer to Moscow. We have not seen the original order, but we have the
supplement to it, the complete
‘List of the works of art held in the special collection of the Gorky State Art
Museum to be transferred to the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts
’ (both the order and supplement are dated 25 January 1955), and it tallies with
the list of 1951. It was at this point that the Gorky Museum made a retaliatory
move. Under the statute in force, it was not possible to transfer to another
institution works of art that were undergoing restoration. On 18 July 1955, the
Gorky Regional Department of Culture sent an application to the Central
Research Laboratory of Art Conservation and Restoration (now the Grabar
All-Russia Art Restoration Centre) for the paintings from the special
collection to be taken for restoration. After the application was approved in
April of 1957, 143 paintings and eight wooden sculptures were transported to
Moscow and received by the Laboratory on 6 August 1957. The systematic, that is
to say unhurried, work of identifying of these art objects was completed by
1966 when their true value and provenance were understood.

The Hungarian origin of the paintings was immediately ascertained. The Ministry
of Culture of the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic ordered a detailed
clarification of their history, so that their future could be decided. At the
beginning of July 1966, two retired officers of the 49th Army then living in
Gorky
– Colonel B. Belikov and Major M. Chernyshev – bore witness in writing to the director of the Gorky Art Museum. Let us quote
the original text of M. Chernyshev
’s note in full since it is the most important testimony on the fate of the
Hungarian paintings:

I, Chernyshev Mikhail Alexandrovich, a merited pensioner living in Gorky,
[address], served during the war in the rank of Major in the Political office
of the 49th Army which made its way from the town of Roslavl to the river Elbe,
northward of Berlin. In August 1945 the 49th Army was relocated to Gorky where
it formed the base for the Gorky Military District.

The Army’s route lay through the territory of the Soviet Union, Poland, and East Germany,
both during military actions and when it was returning to Gorky where it was
stationed.

The Army brought to Gorky, together with its own belongings, crates containing
paintings, sculptures and musical instruments. All these
– paintings, sculptures and musical instruments – the Army donated to the city of Gorky. The assignation order was given by
Lieutenant-General Sychev, a member of the Army Military Council who later
became a member of the District Military Council. I know that the paintings and
sculptures that were donated to the city were only provisionally deposited at
the Gorky Art Museum.

I do not know exactly how the Army came into possession of the paintings, but
what I do know is the following. Some division or unit (I do not know exactly
which one) reported to the Army Headquarters that a crate packed with paintings
and sculptures had been found in the neighbourhood of their encampment. The
Army was situated in Germany. Army Headquarters then ordered the capture of
this abandoned property that had apparently been looted by the Nazis and packed
for evacuation. Thus, the Army came into possession of this property and took
it to Gorky, as all this happened just before the Army
’s return to Gorky.

Signature.8 July 1966.

B.A. Belikov’s note says nothing about the paintings themselves, but specifies that the Army
Headquarters were located in Reinberg by the time the Nazis surrendered. The
report emphasizes that the Army had never been to Hungary and that its route
back to the Soviet Union lay through
‘the following main settlements: Berlin, Bialystok, Bobruisk, Borisov, Moscow,
Gorky
’. Let us note that Reinberg is situated not on the river Elbe but in
Mecklenburg, closer to the present-day eastern borders of Germany. The Gorky
Department of Culture tried to make inquiries about the route of the Army to
Gorky, but without success: the USSR Ministry of Defence Archives stated that
in August 1945 the Army Field Administration was on the march to Bialystok, and
in April 1946 the Gorky Military District was disbanded. (The city is now part
of the Volga Military District.)

At the Central Restoration Laboratory, examination of the labels attached to the
paintings made it possible to ascertain the identities of former owners. The
work of attribution was headed by A. Zernova, Deputy Director of the Laboratory
for Research, while an outstanding art historian Andrei Chegodaev, long-time
keeper of the Special Collection at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, was
invited as a consultant. Proceedings of the consultations held at the beginning
of September bear corrections in Chegodaev
‘s handwriting and his signature. All his notes deal only with matters of
attribution and an evaluation of the work
‘s artistic merit.

The results of this research were compiled in a memorandum addressed to the
Deputy Minister of Culture of the RSFSR. (It is now kept in the archives of the
Grabar All-Russia Art Restoration Centre and dates from between late September
and early October, 1966). On the basis of
‘published facts’ (that is, books by J. Levai and R. and M. Leydewitz), the memorandum holds
Rosenberg
‘s Einsatzstab and Eichmann‘s staff clearly responsible for the plunder of the paintings. It was
specifically mentioned in the memorandum that
‘at the beginning of 1945, a part of the collections belonging to Hungarian
museums was removed from the country. The trucks had reached only as far as
Harz and later were sent back to Hungary, but a certain number of works of art
had disappeared.
’ To determine the future of the collection, it was proposed that we research the
lists of Hungarian losses and Hungarian legislation relating to the
nationalization of cultural valuables and to the rights of Hungarian emigrants
to their inheritance.

Evidently, supplementary information was collected within the following month in
late 1966, as the memorandum compiled by the Ministry of Culture and submitted
to the Central Committee of the CPSU (the draft memorandum is dated by November
of that year, no exact date is indicated) gives more detailed substantiation to
the same ideas, and states, among other things:
‘In order to make a final decision on who are the rightful owners of these works
of art
– private persons or public institutions of the Hungarian People‘s Republic – it is advisable to invite Hungarian experts with knowledge of private and
public art collections. In case of restitution of the above-mentioned
collection to the Government of the Hungarian People
‘s Republic, conservation treatment (such as removing traces of traumatic
injuries and general repairs to enable these works of art to be exhibited
again) is to be carried out by the Grabar All-Russia Art Restoration Centre,
which will take no less than a year.
’

Among the supplements to the memorandum were ‘List of art objects of exceptional value’ and ‘List of paintings from the special collection with the names of their owners’. The first list of all the sculptures and 25 paintings included such well-known
works as
Saint James the Greater’ by El Greco (mistakenly called Christ), Dreaming Mariette by Corot, Mary Laurent with a Pug-dog by Manet, paintings by Goya, Renoir,
Menzeland so on. The majority of paintings, however, had no attribution. This
list does not include works by Hungarian artists such as Mihail Munkcz. The
list of owners included 15 names (we quote them here as they are mentioned in
the document): Baron Ferenc Hatvany (four paintings), Baron Andre Herzog de
Cset (two), Count Gyula Andriess (three), Dr Dezs Szeben (four), Laut
Szedelmeyer (two), one each from the collections of Antony Hrer, Laszlo
Karolyi, Laszlo Laub, Nador, Reiti, Biehn, Manfrlin?s Gallery, Marcell Nemes,
and Miklos Andor. No other owners had been identified by that time.

In 1972, 15 paintings were returned to Hungary by order of the Ministry of
Culture of the USSR. In November, 1992, the Russian Government ordered the
return of two more paintings:
A Model Against Blue Drapery by Istvan Csok and Portrait of a Man in an Armchair by an unknown Hungarian artist. Between 27 February and 16 July 1995, eight
works from the collection of the Nizhny Novgorod Museum were exhibited in the
‘Twice Saved’ exhibition at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. This Museum still
retains five of the most valuable works of art. In 1996, 34 paintings and six
sculptures were returned to Nizhny Novgorod. Twenty paintings and three
sculptures from the
‘Hungarian Collection‘ were exhibited in ‘Masterpieces of Western European Art’ that was held from 31 August to 25 November 1996, under the aegis of the
Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation and with the support of the
Regional Administration of Nizhny Novgorod.

More recently, joint efforts by Hungarian and Russian experts have permitted
more accurate attributions of the paintings and introduced clarity into the
lists of both paintings and their owners. For instance, now nine (not four)
paintings are ascribed to the former Hatvany collection. Meanwhile, in Hungary
new information about which valuables were deposited for safekeeping in the
Budapest banks came to light. The Hungarian representatives expressed their
suspicions that some paintings from these lists might be found in Nizhny
Novgorod; this guesswork became grounds for their assertion that paintings
confiscated from banks in the capital were brought to Nizhny Novgorod directly
from Budapest. Laszlo Mravik became one of the main proponents of this version
by identifying the
‘Nizhny Novgorod’ paintings with those requisitioned by the Red Army in Budapest, with minor
reservations in respect of the Herzog collection and some parts of Hatvany
‘s. After his catalogue was published, this opinion became the official position
of the Hungarian delegation at the negotiations carried out within the
framework of the Russian
–Hungarian Working Group activities on adjustment of mutual restitution claims.

On careful examination of all available materials, it is now evident that Mravik‘s version is far from proven. It is not in question that the paintings were
brought to Nizhny Novgorod by the 49th Army. Mravik who saw the affidavits or
accounts by the two officers and was about to publish them says that they are
of a relatively late origin and seem to have been manipulated, or at least
misinterpreted. This latter remark is rather obscure. If the statements or
affidavits are true, they can be used in only one way: to prove that the
pictures were brought from Germany and not from Hungary. The veracity of these
statements is proved by the very fact of their existence. It was well known in
Gorky that the pictures were left there by soldiers. It was also known that the
location of the 49th Army formed the base of the Volga Military District. It
was for this reason that veterans of the 49th army were sought out to explain
the presence of the paintings. It is quite probable that Major Chernyshev was
simply asked to record his verbal testimony while Colonel Belikov, who
outranked him (he was Head of the Officers
‘ Club and after his resignation was appointed Deputy Director of the Opera
House), supplied general explanations.

It must be said that the affidavits do not give answers to all questions (see
below), but they clearly show that the 49th Army had no connection to Hungary.
From 24 April 1944, until the end of war it was a part of the 2nd Belorussian
Front and participated in the Bialystok, East Prussia and East Pomerania
operations. Later the Army was on the offensive north of Berlin and finished
the war near the towns of Wittenberg and Demitz. On 3 June 1945, the Army
joined the 1st Belorussian Front [from 10 July this Front was called the Group
of Soviet Forces in Germany. Apparently at that time it was relocated to
Mecklenburg on return from Germany in August 1945.

When interpreting the documents drawn up in 1966 one should bear in mind that
they were classified as secret and therefore were not designed to deceive the
public. Neither document contains anything to suggest that the Germans took the
paintings from Hungary. However, the officials were concerned not so much with
how the paintings reached the USSR as with their future. It was the Central
Committee of the CPSU that made the final decision, and, in its view, had the
paintings been taken in Budapest by the Red Army, it would have presented an
additional reason to hush up their location and bury the question of their
return. Meanwhile, both the Gorky Museum
‘s memorandum submitted to the Ministry of Culture of the RSFSR and the Ministry‘s report to the Central Committee proceed from the assumption of partial
restitution of these valuables, and even bringing Hungarian experts into the
process. No one would have taken on such a responsibility without being sure
that the matter concerned treasures plundered by the Nazis. If the top Soviet
echelons had been interested in juggling the facts, they would have been more
likely to do it in a way that impeded their restitution.

Let us also note that the list of the paintings from Hatvany‘s collection that were in his house (and were not removed by Eichmann‘s Sonderkommando) contains no works found later in Gorky. It is also remarkable that, apart from
those in the Nizhny Novgorod Museum, no other paintings from Hungarian
collections have been discovered in Russian cultural institutions. If the
removal of works of art from Budapest to the USSR had been effected on the
scale Mravik believes, it would be impossible to hide them all now. Further
evidence is provided by the movements of Vasari
‘s The Wedding Feast at Caana from the Budapest Fine Arts Museum which, in 1944,
had been held in the depositories of the Ministry of Finance. After the war it
arrived in Canada and was returned by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts to the
Hungarian authorities in 1999. This clearly proves that the bank depositories
in Budapest had been broken open long before Soviet troops took the city.
Clearly it would be worth searching for lost masterpieces not only in Russia
but also in Germany, the United States and other countries with lively art
markets.

However, a number of questions arise in connection with the documents concerning
the
‘Nizhny Novgorod’ paintings. The witnesses‘ indication of where the works of art were found is vague – ‘northward of Berlin’ – which Mravik interpreted as ‘in the vicinity of Berlin’. In fact, what is meant is the bleak countryside around Mecklenburg with no
important cities in sight, the land of large Junker estates in one of which the
treasures in all likelihood were hidden. Another hypothesis has been offered:
at the end of the war the Nazis believed that the province of
Schleswig-Holstein was the safest place; they even had an absurd idea that the
Allies would agree to allow a separate Nazi state to survive there. Wittenberg
– where the 49th Army were camped – is a railway station on the way from Berlin to Schleswig-Holstein. In the
post-war confusion the freight car captured in Wittenberg could have been moved
to a new place with the Army and examined there for the first time. Still, this
hypothesis does not seem as plausible as the first one, and this fact has more
implications than meet the eye. According to Mravik, traces of Hatvany
‘s collection were never found in Germany in spite of a careful search. From this
fact he draws the conclusion that the collection had never been there. We
believe that this is a rather hasty conclusion: it is almost hopeless to search
for hidden paintings in such a lonely and thinly populated country without
precise directions. Apparently the environs of Rheinberg are one of the likely
places to search. On the other hand, some valuables, unfortunately, could have
been destroyed in the course of regular bombing while being transferred in
freight cars. The lost items from this collection are mostly small statuettes
that could have fallen into anyone
‘s hands.

We cannot omit another important fact which hinders establishing exactly how the
paintings arrived in the USSR from Hungary: about 900 books were transferred to
Gorky together with the paintings, including 222 volumes from Baron Moric
Kornfeld
‘s collection and, above all, a part of the Sarospatak Calvinist College Library
whose catalogue was published recently. It is established that the books from
Sarospatak were kept in the Budapest depositories. There were no reasons for
the Germans to take them away unless they were automatically packed together
with other captured bank assets. On the other hand, it is obvious that both
books and statues from Kornfeld
‘s collection would have travelled together. It seems that further investigation
should be undertaken in this field. Let us remember that Major Chernyshev
mentions
‘paintings, statues and musical instruments’ but says nothing about books.

Such are the available facts on the fate of the Hungarian art valuables
transferred to Nizhny Novgorod. We do not aim to analyse the artistic merits of
the works of art represented in this Catalogue: all the masterpieces have been
very well known for a long time and have been introduced into scholarly
discussion again by two recent exhibitions, even though many of the captured
paintings are not of great value in themselves. We can affirm that by putting
together attributions made by experts from Hungary, Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod
experts. We present here the most complete information on the artists, subjects
and former owners of these paintings. Some new names have appeared
– Samuel Glueckstahl, Paul Gordonyi, Jen Hubay, Gyula Wolfner. But we certainly
do not attempt to draw final conclusions.

Thus, the purpose of this Catalogue is both politically neutral and
non-judgemental as well as unpretentious from the point of view of art
criticism. Our aim is simply to bring together information on those works of
art that indisputably survived the catastrophe of the Second World War in order
to inspire other researchers to carry on further investigations.